Stephen Harper Quotes

The party system that is developing here in Canada is a party system that replicates the antebellum period, the pre-Civil War period of the United States... [T]he dynamics, the political and partisan dynamics of this, are remarkably similar.

Last year, when we had the Liberal government putting the protection of sexual orientation in our Human Rights Act, the Reform Party was opposed to that, but made a terrible mess of the debate. In fact, discredited itself on that issue, not just with the conventional liberal media, but even with many social conservatives by the manner in which it mishandled that.

[The Reform Party is] also the most conservative socially, but it's not a theocon party, to use the term. The Reform party does favour the use of referendums and free votes in Parliament on moral issues and social issues.

The predecessor of the Reform party, the Social Credit party, was very much like this. Believing in funny money and control of banking, and a whole bunch of fairly non-conservative economic things.

[The Reform Party] also has some Buchananist tendencies. I know there are probably many admirers of Mr. Buchanan here, but I mean that in the sense that there are some anti-market elements in the Reform Party.

Let me say a little bit about the Reform party because I want you to be very clear on what the Reform party is and is not... The Reform party is very much a leader-driven party.

The Reform party is much closer to what you would call conservative Republican.

They were in favour of gay rights officially, officially for abortion on demand... This explains one of the reasons why the Reform party has become such a power.

In fact, before the Reform Party really became a force in the late '80s, early '90s, the leadership of the Conservative party was running the largest deficits in Canadian history.

But the Progressive Conservative is very definitely liberal Republican. These are people who are moderately conservative on economic matters, and in the past have been moderately liberal, even sometimes quite liberal on social policy matters.

Then there is the Progressive Conservative party, the PC party, which won only 20 seats. Now, the term Progressive Conservative will immediately raise suspicions in all of your minds. It should. It's obviously kind of an oxymoron.

There is an important caveat to its liberal social values. For historic reasons that I won't get into, the Liberal party gets the votes of most Catholics in the country, including many practising Catholics.

In the last Parliament, [the Liberal Party] enacted comprehensive gun control...

[The Liberal party is a] moderate Democrat, a type of Clinton-pragmatic Democrat. It's moved in the last few years very much to the right on fiscal and economic concerns, but still believes in government intrusion in the economy where possible, and does, in its majority, believe in fairly liberal social values.

[T]he NDP is kind of proof that the Devil lives and interferes in the affairs of men.